'The Tanks Have Turned Their Guns on Your Children'

Yesterday the Greek military dictatorship cancelled without explanation the traditional Greek Orthodox memorial services, scheduled for today, to mourn the death of the "13" who were killed by the police and army a month ago. However, many more than 13--probably more than 100--families are mourning for relatives killed November 17 when the dictator confronted the rebelling Greeks with tanks. The revolt is now history, but the outburst was only a warning for the future.

Athens, Greece, November 17, 1973. 1 a.m. The director of the prosecutor's office joins General Thomopoulos, chief of national security, in the police headquarters building. A Greek green beret colonel in civilian attire has been awaiting their arrival since the afternoon.

The problem: The students and workers occupying the Polytechnic Institute in Athens, the nerve center of the two-day old revolt in Athens and the two other major cities of Greece.

A decision on what to do about them had been reached earlier in the afternoon. Dimitrios Ioanides, brigadier general of the military police, was reported to have been in disagreement with the course of action George Papadopoulos and prime minister Spyros Markezinis had chosen. He had wanted drastic action from the outset of the crisis. The military hierarchy of the junta in Athens had sided with Papadopoulos. The students had been in revolt for three days, the population was increasingly restless and the stability of the regime was shaken.

The decision: Respect for academic asylum was to end. The group in the police headquarters would carry out the technical aspects of the capture of the institute.

The solution: At 1:45 a.m., 20 M-48 tanks move through the rioting city and encircle the Institute. At 2 a.m. the tanks point their guns at the students who are perched on the walls and on the iron gate singing Greece's National Anthem, "Hymn of Freedom," and yelling "The army is with us," "You are our brothers," "No blood."

At 2:30 a.m. the tanks flood the building with their headlights, turning night into day. Army trucks arrive at the scene and unload policemen armed with submachineguns and special commando troops.

The students line up behind the main gate. Later, a Dutch television crew that was on the scene reported that there were six rows of students sitting behind the iron gate.

At 3 a.m. one of the tanks rotates its turret, its gun turned away from the Institute to protect it from the impact. The tank charges from the full width of the empty street into the iron gate. The 40-ton steel machine destroys the gate, and the commandos and the policemen charge into the Institute.

The havoc created in the Institute, the destruction of facilities, and most tragic, the loss of life in the struggle are not yet known in their full extent. The Papadopoulos regime reported 13 deaths from the incident, mostly victims hit by "stray" shots--blocks away from the Institute area. Conservative estimates place the actual death toll at 74 while other sources from Greece place it as high as 200.

According to a spokesman for Papadopoulos's regime, the capture of the Institute was completed by 3:30 a.m. But the sirens of the ambulances and the shots of machine-guns combined in a cacophony of violence and destruction long through the morning hours.

Saturday and Sunday saw citizens participating in massive riots and gatherings attacked by police forces reinforced with army units. Groups of 50 to 100 people tried to seize telecommunication facilities and attacked ministries and police stations. But the police apparatus, combined with the military strength of marines, paratroopers and 50 tanks coordinated by helicopters, slowly and bloodily imposed the chains of martial law on the population of Greece. The airports were closed, curfews were imposed, 866 Greeks were rounded up in a soccer stadium by the police, almost 2,000 people were arrested and the political leaders of the past, amnestied weeks ago, were once again confined to their homes for "anarchistic" behavior.

By Monday the shopkeepers opened their stores, the workers started returning to their jobs, the airlines resumed their scheduled flights, and "law and order" was imposed on the Greek people once again.

Yet the Papadopoulos regime started an extensive campaign in the press against the people of Athens, Thessaloniki and Patra who had participated in the revolt. They had to scare the population once more with threats of an impending communist revolt, they had to consolidate their hold on the armed forces and they had to polish the tarnished "stability."

Demetrius Zagorianakos, chief of the armed forces, said on November 21 in justifying the intervention of the armed forces:

"The armed forces increased their readiness and acted with composure, so that the handling of the situation would not become one more element of criticism and polemic for the so-called 'resistance' groups..."

He also said that the resistance groups and persons were not willing to return to normalcy in compliance with Papadopoulos's designs and were primarily interested in vote gathering. It "is only certain that the extreme left will profit from the situation," he said.

Markezinis, the prime minister of the Papadopoulos regime, a politician of the past, accused "the corrupt politicians" of the decade before Papadopoulos of inciting the riots against the regime. He asserted his confidence in the program of return to normalcy by Papadopoulos and concluded:

"The enemy of the nation and of democracy will perish. Once again, we will be the victors: The state, the nation, the society."

To believe in Zagorianakos and Markezinis, one would have to believe that the Papadopoulos regime handled a threat to the very existence of Greek society in the smoothest way possible.

But whom were they trying to subdue? What did the movement represent, what did the participants and their leadership desire, and what did they accomplish?

The toppling of the Papadopoulos regime by dissident junta members is, of course, an important consequence of the crisis. The young Greek students and workers, along with the city dwellers who revolted against the dictatorship, are the real force behind events. Elements in the armed forces felt they had to correct the situation which placed them as the opponents of the Greek people.

They conspired together and pulled off a successful coup which eliminated Papadopoulos. Phaidon Gyzilis, the commander of the first Greek army and his colleagues, high-ranking military and top-level bureaucrats, make strange bedfellows with the powerful remnants of the Papadopoulos junta. Brigadier general Dimitrios Ioanides, the head of military police, is the most powerful left-over from the previous regime. Ioanides, who has established a reputation for toughness and viciousness, is a man who believes that democracy is either a luxury or a disaster for the Greek people. His faction believes that the student-led revolt was a demonstration of immaturity and that it contained the seeds of anarchy.

In reality, the revolt was the only resort of the oppressed students of Greece, and as such was not only an expression of political maturity, but it was also the legitimate expression of popular dissatisfaction with the dictatorial regime.

The control of all aspects of academic life by military officers, the extensive use of spies and stoolpigeons, and the repressive legislation had but one effect: it forced the student movement underground. During the first three years of the junta a "Regas Pheraios" group--named for a hero of the 1821 Greek war of independence--was broken up by the military police and intelligence services. The members were tortured extensively and the group was severely crippled. In 1972, the dictatorship allowed elections for student council leaders for the first time since 1967. But as a result of ballot stuffing and repressive registration rules, even officials admitted that the "elected leaders" represented only 10 to 15 per cent of the students.

In the spring of the same year students demanding academic freedom captured the University of Athens in the first violent expression of opposition to the junta. The demonstrations were crushed by the police and special legislation was passed which entitled the regime to draft dissident students into the army. Approximately 100 students were drafted at the time. The regime then turned its attention to an abortive navy coup and efforts to legitimize its pretense to the Greek people.

The students were on vacation when the junta carried through its referendum installing Papadopoulos as the president of the Greek "Republic" amidst cries and protests of fraud and deception at the ballot box.

In July of 1973, however, rumors of a future alliance of workers and students for demonstrations around the end of October started trickling through to observers in the United States. However, Papadopoulos kept the initiative, and the focus of attention on his regime with a new prime minister, Spyros Markezinis, amnesty to all political prisoners, and the promise of elections for 1974.

The economy, however, caught in a spiraling 15 per cent inflation--the worst in Europe at the time--was starting to have an effect on the Greek people. A memorial service for George Papandreou, former prime minister, brought on riots which for the first time attacked the police and repulsed the riot units with stones and sheer mass.

Just ten days later, on the 14th of November, the student organization struck its decisive blow against the Papadopoulos regime. During the afternoon all faculties of the Universities of Greece held meetings in their respective schools. At midnight, a group started occupying the Polytechnic Institute of Athens. The other meetings in Athens sent representatives to the Institute shortly afterwards. In a first general meeting, the students collectively examined the academic and political problems and agreed on a platform of demands and a list of slogans and messages.

The concern of the students for order as well as democratic procedure was demonstrated clearly by the system of electing committees voted on during the same meeting.

Each student would stand up and give his name. He would then proceed to a blackboard where the candidates were listed and make a cross next to the name of his choice.

The same procedure went on nightly for the next few days so that the voting and the resulting committees would represent the sentiments of the people still in the Institute.

The committees elected a coordinating committee to take charge of daily life in the Institute and decide on the demands and slogans. In the early hours of the 15th of November, the coordinating committee had to provide for the daily life of all the students who locked themselves in the Institute, handling everything from food and security to maintenance of the facilities. The first actions of the Committee were directed against the provocateurs and government spies inside the Institute, who had started writing "Down with the State," "Down with Authority," on the walls to give an anarchist image to the movement. The anarchist or provocateur elements which student leaders said were planted by government also controlled a radio station from which they transmitted messages which could potentially discredit the movement as an anarchistic, apolitical movement.

The coordinating committee tried to silence this radio station, while it controlled the radio station within the Institute. It denounced all slogans which could discredit the movement and which were not in line with the consensus of the general assembly.

In the meantime the problems of nutrition, medical care, dormitory facilities, maintenance of facilities and security were handled by separate committees.

A student locked in the Polytechnic Institute did not have to worry about food. It was given to him for free, since the Athenians poured in supplies of groceries to the students through student-controlled side-doors. The buildings were kept clean, and there were signs reminding students not to damage the facilities. Complete medical care was also available to the students. Thus the students were actually locked in a free environment unheard of in Greece since the coup of April 1967.

Early in the morning of the 15th the students started making their demands known to the rest of the population.

"The leader is one, the people are the leader," "Down with Fascism," "Down with the junta," "Democracy," "People you starve, why don't you fight," "Bread--Education--Freedom," they yelled. And 20,000 Athenians gathered outside the Institute joined in.

Inside, the Institute professors made rounds with students to make sure that the facilities remained intact. At the same time the faculty senate appealed to the government to respect academic asylum at a grave personal risk.

The government did not act, and the student radio continued its broadcast:

"We once more declare our positions:

1.) Anti-junta: We are fighting for the overthrow of the junta.

2.) Anti-fascist: We are fighting to establish an anti-fascist democracy in Greece.

3.) Anti-imperialist: We are fighting to achieve the independence of Greece from foreign interest."

The students denounced the economic policies of the junta which had led to the revaluation of the drachma, 30% inflation in basic foodstuffs, and the use of the Greek government's much needed stores of petroleum for the Athens-based American Sixth Fleet.

The Institute by now had become the focal point of the struggle, directing units of unarmed people to different points of the city. Construction workers started coming into the University, and close to 200 workers occupied a governmental building in Athens.

The riots were spreading. Thesaloniki, Patra and Prama joined the list of cities with student directed revolts. The American embassy was heavily guarded by police who feared attack by the angry demonstrators.

In mid-afternoon the students allowed reporters to come in and examine the premises, after checking their credentials for fear of government infiltration. In a brief meeting with the press the student leaders officially stated their objectives.

They said that change towards a free education was inseparable from political realities. They said: "We consider the primary precondition for the solution of the people's problems the immediate end to the tyrannical regime of the junta, and the parallel establishment of popular sovereignty.

"The establishment of popular sovereignty is intimately connected with national independence from the foreign interests that have supported the tyranny in our country for years."

In the afternoon of the 16th, the police started shooting in the air and patrolling the city with armored tear-gas vehicles. Hundreds of tear-gas canisters were thrown into the Institute. The student-security committee, however, directed people to light fires and wear protective masks to neutralize the effects of the gas. The first pleas for medical equipment and supplies came from the radio station. The injury lists grew.

As night came on, the large crowds were dispersed from the area surrounding the university and by 2 a.m. the radio station fell silent as the tanks surrounded the Institute. Before 3 a.m. the station broadcasted:

"People of Greece: we are unarmed. Unarmed. The students are facing the tanks. The tanks have turned their guns on your children, people of Greece... This moment, people of Greece, you can see what the Americans have caused us."

The tank broke the gate....

The following week in the United States, congressmen protested, editorials condemned American support of the junta, and among others UAW president Leonard Woodcock said: "The power of the dictatorship has rested on the twin base of arms and credits, both supplied in abundance by the U.S. Its reputation was internationally vouched for by Spiro T. Agnew, the convicted tax-evader..."

With a new junta in power, Greece is still in the news and the clamour goes on in the United States. After the overthrow of the Papadopoulos regime, Senators Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) and Clairborne Pell (D-R.I.) introduced a bill in the Senate: "To prohibit all military assistance to Greece until it is determined that Greece is fulfilling its obligations under the North Atlantic Treaty."

The treaty states in its preamble that "the parties are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law.

It just might be too late. Six years and $400 million ago, "for the vital defense of the southern flank of the NATO alliance," the United States bought a base but might have lost a country.